Zero Clock Skew Synchronization With Rotary Clocking Technology

Vinayak Honkote and Baris Taskin
Drexel University


Abstract

Rotary clocking is a resonant clocking technology that provides a low-power, low-jitter clock signal with controllable skew. Due to the “rotary” traveling of the clock signal on the ring interconnect, each location on the rotary ring network leads to a different clock phase. Consequently, one of the features of the rotary clocking technology is the inherent non-zero clock skew operation. In this paper, it is shown that zero clock skew circuits can also be efficiently implemented with rotary clock synchronization. Design automation experiments are performed to demonstrate that the zero clock skew operation can be achieved with minimal change in the performance of rotary clock operation. In particular, a marginal ±1.5% change in the tapping wirelength is reported in experiments on R1-R5 benchmark circuits.